Mister Beacon

This week we speak with one of the leaders in indoor navigation, Pointr sales leader Paul Dupont, who shares how their platform has evolved over the past 5 years, the use cases that are taking off and insights into the issues that buyers should be aware of before investing into Indoor Positioning Systems.  Plus, we share some advanced information on Wiliot’s new Starter Kit, which now makes their Internet of Everyday things technology available to Everyone for the first time. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Supply chain issues are impacting our business and personal lives.  They are also a major driver of IoT projects.  This week we’re talking with Bob Trebilcock, who is the editorial director at Supply Chain Management Review, about the current state of the supply chain, where it is failing, and how it will evolve moving forward.We also talk about omni channel supply chain, which companies are using it currently, as well as which companies are falling by the wayside. And towards the end of the show we’ll talk about Bob’s career, as well as his favorite songs (linked below). Enjoy!Purple Haze from the first Jimi Hendrix album. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGoDaYjdfSg&list=RDWGoDaYjdfSg&start_radio=1 Fire and Rain from James Taylor Sweet Baby James album. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbD7lfrsY2s Julian Bream playing Bourree - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7aDW1kWbAUBloomdido - Charlie Parker and Dizzy GIllespie from Bird and Diz - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT3wyNwfN

This week we’re talking with Bryan Merckling, CEO of Thinaer, about the tools and methods that companies like his are implementing which are helping to bring true scale to the IoT space. This is helping businesses take a good idea and bring it to life profitably. We cover everything from tags to robots in an effort to roll back the curtain on how companies like Thinaer are bringing asset tracking to businesses as a turnkey service.Also, how is a technology like RFID stacking up against newer implementations like BLE over 2.4GHz? Find out this and so much more!            For more information about Thinaer, visit https://thinaer.io/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Today we’re talking with Ramesh Kesanupalli, who is the Co-Founder of the Accountable Digital Identity Association (ADIA), about the benefits of a single digital identity for accessing all accounts over the internet. Not only is this a much easier way to access all your accounts, it is also far more secure, preventing fraud and bringing accountability to the real world.Listen along as we discuss various aspects of cybersecurity, current authentication technologies like FIDO, and much more. We even get to hear about some of Ramesh’ favorite songs from India, here are the links to those:https://youtu.be/h9X3R_y1Y94 https://youtu.be/zuPoUsdXrqMhttps://youtu.be/Rabux6-hDz4https://youtu.be/YTLCkrHPPgQ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This episode we’re talking with Andy Ward, who is the Co-Founder and CTO of Ubisense, about various technologies from ultra wideband, to bluetooth, machine vision and many more, which his company utilizes within car manufacturing factories to automate the assembly line process.Listen as we discuss these various technologies, old and new, and how in combination they have the chance to change the manufacturing process from top to bottom. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week we’ve brought on Tim Debus, who is the President and CEO of The Reusable Packaging Association, to talk about the various benefits businesses can realize when they turn to sustainable, reusable packaging. Tim’s focus is on transportation and distribution packaging (such as bins, crates, etc.), which is an area primed for disruption and improvement.Combined with auto-ID technology, reusable packaging is sure to change the supply chain industry as a whole, making the experience better (and more lucrative) for both buyers and sellers alike.  Enjoy this conversation as we cover everything from grocery stores, clothing supply chains, and the circular economy as a whole. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week we’re talking about the circular economy and the process of making fashion more sustainable with auto-ID technology. We’ve brought on Tom Cridland, who is a fashion designer, podcaster, and musician who has created a new clothing line with a 30-year guarantee in order to promote more sustainability in the fashion and clothing space.We discuss the impact of auto-ID in the fashion industry, and how Bluetooth tags in clothing could be implemented to improve supply chains as well as creating a used market for clothing. We also hear Tom’s experiences with Elton John and his band, and what ultimately inspired him as a musician and fashion designer. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

For this week's episode on branding in the IoT space, we have Adam Hanft on the show to share some of his strategic findings from working in the branding arena for the last several decades. Adam has a creative director background, working at many agencies as an advertiser, and has worked with the likes of Alan Kay ("If You See Something, Say Something"), and even Barack Obama with the "get out the vote" campaign.The truth is, there is no industry or category of business that can avoid the need for branding, and this includes IoT. So today, we discuss ideas ranging from "fast brain slow brain" to grading the IoT space when it comes to branding and messaging effectiveness. We talk about huge successes like Apple in creating amazing brands, and huge failures like the Sony Betamax. Showing how the best product doesn't always win and the advantage of having a powerful and effective brand. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week we will hear a unique perspective. Our guest is from Minew, a Chinese company that has focused on the IoT field for more than a decade, both manufacturing their own products and acting as the hardware supplier for many other Bluetooth beacons and tag brands. They have seen the Bluetooth beacon market from its birth and have collaborated with many notable corporations, including Alibaba, Google, Here, and Huawei. Eason Huang joins us from China to discuss the demand for IoT today, where it is heading, and the opportunities and challenges that solution providers are facing.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Can you guess what the world's largest indoor location services platform is? Cisco’s DNA Spaces platform handles over 1 trillion location updates from 1 million access points deployed across 120,000 locations worldwide, so it is a serious contender for this title. The strategic implications of a giant like Cisco building a services platform like this impacts the entire ecosystem of customers and vendors that are in adjacent and overlapping spaces. This week we have the opportunity to get a look inside DNA Spaces with Product Manager Lucas Hanson. Tune in to learn how Cisco is digitizing physical spaces at an unprecedented scale and how you can harness the data from your existing Cisco wireless infrastructure to turn it into consumable insights and actionable business outcomes. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Every day, Kontakt.io’s products touch millions of people in shopping malls, office buildings, and hospitals. With devices in over 50 airports, it likely that many of us have departed and arrived at once equipped with Kontakt.io! This week we are excited to have Rom Eizenberg, Chief Revenue Officer and an industry veteran with 15+ years of experience in IoT, on the podcast. It has been three years since Kontakt.io’s last appearance on the podcast, and Rom is here to shed some light on what they have been up to and their achievements in the previous few years. Tune in to learn about their latest product, Portal Beam, and to hear Rom’s answer to the loaded question, ‘Has IoT been successful?’. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What is the state of IoT on the high seas? What can those of us on dry land learn from the evolution of this business we all depend on? A lot has changed in the past year, and the shipping industry has been no stranger to the effects of COVID-19. Sam Jha joins us back on the podcast after his debut in 2017 to share how the shipping industry has been evolving and what Alpha Ori is doing to enable transparency, analytics and increase productivity. Join us this week to hear about Ship Operations 2.0 and how the Alpha Ori is digitizing the industry with software and sensors one ship at a time.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Do you know the global language of business? The language of Unique Product Codes (UPCs) that identify products and companies for sale in stores and major online marketplaces? This language enables barcodes, playing to the beat of 6 million scans a day, all over the world. This week we sit down with Melanie Nuce, SVP Corporate Development at GS1 US, to learn why more than 300,000 companies across 25 industries turn to GS1 for guidance. GS1 is a not-for-profit global standards organization, most known for supply chain identification. 50 years after the barcode was first scanned, GS1 continues to help brands and retailers leverage unique identities, capture information in a machine-readable way, and share data with trading partners to drive business decisions. Tune in to get a behind-the-scenes look into business, and to learn all the things you need to know about GS1 and it’s standards.   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

For the first time on the Mr. Beacon Podcast, we have put the rubber to the road and experimented with a solution internally before sitting down for the interview. This week, we are happy to welcome Nathan Dunn, CEO of BlueCats, back on the podcast to discuss the experience of deploying their contact tracing solution in our local Wiliot office. The BlueCats solution is both preventative and reactive in nature, by warning users to keep a safe distance while providing a tracing system to warn users of possible past exposure. Nathan calls the solution a ‘physical insurance policy’, enabling employees to feel more comfortable coming back into the work environment. Hear how our tests worked out and what Nathan’s latest observations are on the evolution and intersection of UWB & BLE.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What does it mean to ‘modernize your supply chain’?To Digimarc, it involves moving beyond the conventional barcode to an imperceptible data carrier, the Digimarc barcode, that can be repeated many times on packaging without spoiling the appearance. Digimarc is helping businesses across many industries solve for brand protection, sustainability, and traceability. Their digital identity can be applied to material and media of all kinds, including packaging, labels, audio, fabric, and more. We welcome Sprague Ackley, Principal R&D Engineer at Digimarc, back on the Mr. Beacon Podcast to learn about the technology behind the invisible barcode and how it works. Tune in to learn about the use cases that are driving leading retailers, brand owners, packaging suppliers, and even all of the currencies of the world to adopt the Digimarc Barcode. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

How is it ‘that virtually every person on the face of the earth has the ability to scan a barcode in their pocket’? Success in IoT depends on understanding how the ecosystem operates. Auto-ID is a building block at the heart of IoT and AIM is the industry group that defines auto-ID standards. It does the things that companies on their own, even giants, can’t achieve. This week we have a peek inside AIM. For ‘nearly half a century, it has provided unbiased information, educational resources and standards to providers and users of these technologies’, Barcodes, QR Codes, RFID, and Bluetooth, to name a few. Sprague Ackley, Principal R&D Engineer at Digimarc, a contributor to AIM for much of his career, points out the many parts of our lives that auto-ID enhances: think of getting packages to your door just in the nick of time, making sure your COVID vaccine has been accurately tracked and traced, or the military receiving the materials they need under incredibly difficult conditions. Now that

The next time you buy a product, a purse or a pair of shoes, imagine the capabilities that could be unlocked if it were really a platform.The purse could digitally verify its own authenticity, your shoes could seamlessly share the story of their design and origins. ‘Product to Platform’ is the transformation Blue Bite have been enabling: A new way of engaging customers throughout the entire product lifecycle to protect the brand, tell its story, and enable new product commerce opportunities. Blue Bite plays in many industries and has worked with many notable brands like L’Oréal, Bulgari, Adidas, Moët Hennessy, and Samsung. They have helped these brands digitize their products with connecting technologies like QR codes and NFC, which are managed by their ‘Experience Studio’ platform. Tune in this week as we chat with Mikhail Damiani, CEO of Blue Bite, to hear about which applications are driving each of these technologies and the new experiences that Blue Bite are bringing to market.  See a

Why is it that decision makers should care about data science? The simplest answer could be that some of the biggest businesses are leaders in data science. Think of Netflix, Amazon, Google, Facebook. Their content is all curated by artificial intelligence. Tune in this week to hear a fascinating episode with Dr. Stylianos Kampakis about data science in our world today and to dive into his book “The Decision Makers Handbook to Data Science”. We double click on all the buzz words: artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning - demystifying and providing context to these subjects that are important for leaders to understand.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

 You’ve heard about the Amazon Go Store and all the big box retailers implementing technology to transform the way we shop, but are we seeing the same advancements in the luxury sector? This week we talk to Inspify, a technology company that is ‘reinventing the art of retail in luxury boutiques’. Thorsten Walther, CEO of Inspify, sits down with us to talk about their product: a customer experience platform as a service. Currently, their focus is creating custom experiences for luxury brands in the boutique and online for jewelry and watches. Tune in this week to catch a glimpse of Inspify’s exceptional work turning the offline to online with the creation of virtual boutiques, equipped with the ultimate live chat feature with a sales representative. Coming full circle, we learn about how Inspify are using beacons on time pieces to engage with customers as a tool to enable social sharing and immerse them into product storytelling. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Why would you want Near Field Communication, or more commonly known as NFC, technology in soccer balls, hand bags, and COVID testing kits?After this conversation with Avery Dennison’s Head of NFC business, Amir Khoshniyati, you’ll be asking ‘Why not?’. To name a few uses that Amir mentions, the unique ID that NFC provides can enable authenticity, consumer engagement and loyalty, and supply chain visibility. Avery Dennison, who recently acquired Smartrac, are a company whose products are used in almost every industry. These include ‘pressure-sensitive materials for labels and graphic applications; tapes and other bonding solutions for industrial, medical, and retail applications; tags, labels and embellishments for apparel; and radio frequency identification (RFID) solutions serving retail apparel and other markets.’ NFC technology falls under the RFID umbrella, of which they are the world’s largest provider. Tune in this week to learn about the use cases NFC are enabling today, uniquely in COVID times, a